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At Sundance, the VR Filmmaking Revolution Is Officially Underway

Visitors to Sundance's New Frontier program try out Assent, an interactive Oculus Rift installation documenting part of the Caravan of Death following the coup in Chile in 1973.

Angela Watercutter/WIRED

PARK CITY, Utah—When she takes off the headset, her eyes are wet.

It's the opening of the Sundance Film Festival's New Frontier program, and I'm in line to see interactive artist Chris Milk's new virtual reality experience Clouds Over Sidra—but I let Shari Frilot, the event's senior programmer, go ahead of me. (It's her efforts that led to Clouds even being here, after all.) While Frilot wears the Samsung Gear VR, getting an immersive glimpse into the life of a 12-year-old girl in a Syrian refugee camp in Jordan, Milk and I get a glimpse at the emotional impact that VR story telling can have. "I love watching people's reactions," Milk says.

If he has his way, Milk will be seeing a lot of those. Days ago, he announced the launch of his smartphone app and distribution platform VRSE, which allows folks with a smartphone and Google's Cardboard device to watch a series of VR experiences. In addition to Clouds, early offerings include Vice News VR: Millions March, a short documentary of the December 2014 police brutality protests in NYC that Milk made with director Spike Jonze, and Milk's CGI-rendered abstract piece Evolution of Verse, which puts a VR twist on early film audiences' terrified reactions at watching a train speed toward the camera in the 1895 French film L'arrivée d'un train en gare de La Ciotat.

And Milk isn't the only one announcing plans to crack that particular code at Sundance. Today Oculus VR announced its own initiative called Story Studio, which focuses on developing animated/CGI films. (The idea is that live-action-style projects are already in the capable hands of folks like Milk.) Story Studio is an internal team at Oculus being led by former Pixar director Saschka Unseld (The Blue Umbrella) as the creative director, Max Planck (another Pixar vet) as supervising technical director, and entrepreneur Edward Saatchi as producer. Oculus' plan, says CEO Brendan Iribe, is to figure out the best ways to do film in VR so that the company can work with directors to bring their heady ideas to the headset.

"We really look at this as something that's going to be—a decade or two from now—like going from theater to 2-D film," Iribe says. "It's going to be completely new and transformative."

Oculus Story Studio's creative director Saschka Unseld.

Courtesy Oculus

VRSE and Oculus Story Studio, along with many of the projects here at the New Frontier program, signal the beginning of a seismic shift in filmmaking—one that, from the look of conventional cinema, might be well overdue. Ticket sales at multiplexes are down, we're just as inclined to wait for a streaming or VOD release as we are to hit the theater, and filmmakers themselves are looking to get into the prestige cable game as much as they're looking to get into Sundance. Audiences are still interested in great storytelling, but the way they consume it—and where—is very much in flux. And now that Facebook has acquired Oculus, Samsung is offering Gear VR, and Google has Cardboard, it's very possible VR could be the thing that brings the excitement of those first silent movies back. Even if it is happening in our living rooms.

Revolution in Park City

The VRSE app is only a part of Milk's master plan. He also announced a collection of ventures designed to create an entirely new ecosystem for VR filmmaking. There's a production company called VRSE.works, which will serve to connect creators with studios; there's also VRSE.tools, which makes cameras and other gear; and, finally, there's VRSE.farm, which is doing R&D for VR storytelling. That last venture is a partnership with Annapurna Pictures (American Hustle, Her) and Megan Ellison (daughter of Oracle founder Larry Ellison).

"It's a partnership to develop the language of narrative storytelling in virtual reality," Milk says. "We're going to help filmmakers—some of them well-known, some of them not well-known at all—explore the medium and try to figure out how to tell a compelling story to human beings. It's a big challenge and it's going to take a lot of trial-and-error, but that's the goal."

"In the last year Hollywood is getting more and more excited and aggressive in all different ways to figure out how they can interface with the technology," says Bryan Besser, the agent who represents VR creators Felix & Paul, who brought three live-action pieces to Sundance. "The most common question from that community is, 'When can we do a movie? When can we have a 90-minute narrative in VR that is interactive, that is choose-your-own-adventure?'"

Besser— and Felix and Paul—agree that full-length narrative features probably isn't where VR filmmaking going. (Honestly, maybe these things aren't even movies.) "We would rather think of working in short-form content," says Félix Lajeunesse. "To be actually interesting and relevant for 90 minutes at this point in the process is quite far-fetched. As we get to really sort of master the DNA of what that medium is really all about then maybe we can start expanding."

A still from Perspective; Chapter 1: The Party.

courtesy Perspective; Chapter 1: The Party

Looking around Park City, it's easy to see the possibilities for VR filmmaking. This year's festival has some creative uses of the new platform: Milk's stuff; Félix and Paul's documentary-like experience looking at yak herders in Mongolia; and Perspective; Chapter I: The Party, a collaboration between director Rose Troche and CG ace Morris May that allows viewers to experience a date rape scenario. (Yes, it's as unsettling as it sounds.) "It's using this technology to put yourself in someone else's shoes," says Troche, who first came to Sundance 21 years ago with her film Go Fish. "I don't know that I would have done this had it not been in this particular form."

Yet, it also looks like just the beginning.

Changing What 'Film' Looks Like

For the most part, the "films" made for VR so far are essentially 360-degree 3D movies. So far, they lack an ability to take advantage of positional tracking so you can examine people or objects from different angles like you can in pre-rendered videogames. The experiences are more immersive, but virtual reality has the potential to change everything about what we call films, and how we make them. When viewers can look anywhere at any time, directors still have to determine how to direct viewers' attention to specific areas within that sphere of vision. Quick cuts are too disorienting as well; in fact, the entire visual grammar of film may need to be completely overhauled, just as it was in the late 19th century when the moving camera was invented.

But figuring out this new format is exactly what these filmmakers want to do. "It's like literally starting my entire career over again. We don't know how to do anything, we don't know how to figure everything out," says May, who's spent some 20 years doing VFX for movies like Spider-Man 3 and X-Men Origins: Wolverine. "In computer graphics, everything's kind of been figured out. But now with this, nobody knows how to do this."

That's why Milk's VRSE ventures and Oculus Story Studio are so exciting. While VRSE is working with some of the best storytelling minds out there to tackle the issue (e.g., "Turn Down for What" director duo Daniels, interactive play *Sleep No More'*s Felix Barrett), Milk is also looking to make the tools needed to create VR films and the studio system to produce and release them.

Oculus, in turn, is working on multiple internal projects in hopes of solving the storytelling and technical hurdles necessary to make VR a viable format for filmmakers who don't know the first thing about videogame engines. It's an initiative that's been in the works since before Facebook bought the company last March, when investor Marc Andreessen pointed out that film could be a big part of VR's place in the media spectrum (he would eventually introduce the Oculus folks to his friends in Hollywood).

Back then, Unseld and Iribe questioned whether they could get the people they wanted to leave top-of-their-game gigs at place like Industrial Light & Magic or Pixar. As it turned out, they found more than a few Steve Jobses—folks who would rather launch the Next Big Thing than keep working on the Same Old One. Unseld notes it's "so much more exciting [to work in VR] than to work within a field that has been so established and has been around since forever."

"A new medium doesn't come often," Iribe adds. "The 2-D film space is fairly mature, even the CG side is fairly mature, but the VR, truly 3-D interactive cinema side is just about to take off. This team came together to be the pioneers."